Parents of young children are often faced with the dilemma of wanting their children to play indoors so they can be readily supervised but having to forego that interest when the child selects a wheeled vehicle, such as a tricycle, to play on.
Various types of toy vehicle roads are available. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,842,194 discloses toy road boards comprising plastic panels, connected via square or rectangular Velcro tabs. The boards feature connectable realistic geographical areas depicting a multiplicity of scenes--residential, city, country, and race track--replete with buildings, trees and different ground elevations embossed in the plastic board material. The miniaturized scenes include "roadways" that can be connected from one board to the next. See column 1, lines 60-68, and column 2, lines 58-68 (indicating "city" board, "residential" board, and "off road area" board, for example). However, the roads of the '194 patent are for use with miniature toy vehicles rather than for a child to play on and are not cited as offering a closed-loop configuration. Moreover, such boards typically cannot be configured in a length and form to allow the child to meander from room to room. Nor are such boards cited as being skid-proof.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 4,241,875 features a flexible track made up of a multiplicity of interconnected rigid track sections shaped to define desired vertical and horizontal curvatures, such as banks and hills. The track is made of track sections extending laterally and coupled to permit pivotal displacement of the track segments about an axis. Such track, however, is designed to accommodate road racing vehicles, particularly electrically powered slot car sets (see column 1, lines 5-10), and not children riding wheeled vehicles.
Consequently, a need exists for a roadway that young children may play on, for example, with their tricycles, that is made of a flexible material, that has a skid-proof top surface and backing to ensure the safety of the young child, and that can be configured into a closed roadway of a variety of shapes and lengths.